• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, July 19, 2006

Google last quarter captured 44.7 percent of all U.S. searches--almost as many as Yahoo (28.5 percent), MSN (12.8 percent), and Time Warner (5.6 percent) combined, according to new data released Tuesday by comScore Networks.

Overall, U.S. Web users performed 8.8 billion searches on Google sites last quarter, marking a 55 percent increase from the second quarter of 2005. The search volume at sites owned by Yahoo and MSN also increased, but at a slower pace. Yahoo saw 5.6 billion searches in the second quarter, marking a 21 percent increase from the same time last year, while MSN-Microsoft sites drew 2.8 billion searches--up 8 percent from 2005.

While search volume slowed somewhat from May to June, it still far surpassed that of 2005. comScore reported that U.S. Web users conducted 6.4 billion searches last month--marking a 6 percent drop from May, but a 29 percent increase from last year.

Google accounted for 2.9 billion of June searches, while Yahoo claimed 1.8 billion and MSN-Microsoft garnered 818 million.

In the toolbar arena, Google and Yahoo each accounted for about half the market, with Google claiming 49.6 percent of toolbar searches, and Yahoo garnering 46.1 percent.